1. Technical Field
The embodiments herein generally relate to wireless technologies, and, more particularly, to digital video broadcasting for handheld (DVB-H) television (TV) systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
In DVB-T (terrestrial) TV systems, video is carried over Moving Picture Experts Group-2 (MPEG-2) transport stream (TS) packets, with each TS packet being 188 bytes long. A DVB-T receiver normally consists of a radio frequency (RF) tuner, a demodulator, and a video decoder. The demodulator output is usually embodied as TS packets that are carried to the video decoder through a TS interface. Some examples of such TS interfaces are digital video broadcasting-synchronous parallel interface (DVB-SPI) and asynchronous serial interface (ASI) interfaces.
DVB-H mobile TV systems, on the other hand, transmit video over internet protocol (IP) packets (also known as IP datagrams). In order to be backward compatible with DVB-T and DVB-H, internet protocol (IP) datagrams are mapped into TS packets and multiplexed with other DVB-T TS packets. This is how DVB-T and DVB-H services can share the same physical layer (PHY).
A typical DVB-H receiver extracts DVB-H IP datagrams from TS packets as shown in FIG. 1. A TS demultiplexer (demux) is used to extract IP datagrams from TS packets. The IP datagrams are collected in a memory known as Multi Protocol Encapsulation-Forward Error Correction (MPE-FEC) random access memory (RAM). Reed Solomon (RS) decoding is performed on the collected datagrams to correct any transmission errors. The corrected IP datagrams are then forwarded to the video decoder (or applications host processor) through an IP interface, such as secure digital input/output (SDIO), SPI, or universal serial bus (USB) interfaces.
If simultaneous DVB-T/DVB-H reception is required, the receiver typically has to have two interfaces as shown in FIG. 2. Moreover, a TS interface for DVB-T TS and an IP interface for IP datagrams are both needed. Having two different interfaces between the demodulator and the host processor is not desirable as this adds significant complexity and power consumption. Accordingly, there remains a need for a new manner of allowing DVB-T/DVB-H reception without requiring two interfaces.